David Bodian (15 May 1910 – 18 September 1992) was an American medical scientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who worked in polio research. In the early 1940s he helped lay the groundwork for the eventual development of polio vaccines by combining neurological research with the study of the pathogenesis of polio. With his understanding of the disease, he made a series of crucial discoveries that paved the way for the final development of a vaccine by Jonas Salk and later by Albert Sabin.

Bodian advanced from Assistant Professor in epidemiology to Associate Professor in 1946, and became Professor of Anatomy and director of the department in 1957. When he accepted the position of professor emeritus of anatomy and neurobiology in the Department of Laryngology and Otology in 1977, he ran an electron microscopy laboratory. In his later work, Bodian studied the spiral structure within the cochlea known as the Organ of Corti.

David Bodian married Elinor Widmont, a medical illustrator and painter who contributed illustrations to some of Bodian's published articles, in 1944. They had five children. Bodian died of Parkinson's disease in September 1992.

Over the next twenty years, the Hopkins team made a series of discoveries, several of which were crucial for the development of a vaccine against polio. In 1946 Isabel Morgan joined the team and together they found out that there were three basic immunological types of poliovirus, explaining the phenomenon of second infections and the fact that artificial immunity to only one strain would not protect against infection with one of the others. Their publication on the "Differentiation of Types of Poliomyelitis Viruses," in the American Journal of Hygiene in 1949[1] became a milestone in the development of new polio vaccine methods.

The contributions of Bodian, Morgan, and Howe thus laid the scientific groundwork for the subsequent development of the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines. In Bodian's own summary their accomplishments were:

1) the elucidation of the pathogenesis and pathology of poliovirus in monkeys, chimpanzees and man; 2) the introduction of the chimpanzee into poliomyelitis research, as a model for the disease in human beings; 3) the demonstration that experimental primates and man could be successfully immunized with formalin-treated virus, and that immunity in monkeys was correlated with the presence of serum antibody; 4) the discovery of the three basic immunological poliovirus types. These studies were crucial for setting the stage for vaccine development; 5) the demonstration of a viremic phase of poliovirus infection in the pre-symptomatic period, and its relationship to poliovirus invasion of the central nervous system; and 6) the demonstration that minimal levels of serum antibody were sufficient to protect against poliovirus invasion of the central nervous system, after virus feeding, by blockage of viremic invasion.

— David Bodian, A letter to A. McGehee Harvey contained in the David Bodian Collection, The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

In 1980, the Johns Hopkins University dedicated the Bodian Room in recognition of his contributions to polio research. He received an honorary doctorate from the university in 1987, and the year before his death, in the spring of 1991, the School of Hygiene and Public Health named him one of seventy-five "Heroes of Public Health."[3]